Irssi 0.8.17 Released

Irssi 0.8.17 has been released. This release contains many new
goodies including documentation cleanup, 256 colour support, truecolour support
and tons of other smaller enhancements. For a complete list of changes and
bugfixes, since 0.8.16, please have a look at the ChangeLog.

Irssi 0.8.17-rc2 Released

Irssi 0.8.17-rc2 has been released. The changes mostly include
stabilisation fixes reported by you guys after the RC1 release. Check out the
NEWS file for all changes and please report bugs back to us.

Irssi 0.8.17-rc1 Released

Irssi 0.8.17-rc1 has been released. The changes includes bug fixes,
documentation cleanup, 256 colour support, truecolour support and various other
enhancements. Check out the NEWS file for all changes and please report bugs
back to us.

The Future of Irssi

Irssi hasn’t been under active development for the last few years. We want to change that. To make it easier for new contributors to get involved and stick around, we moved to where most open source contributors are spending their time: the source is now maintained on Github.

Contribution Model

The repositories that are currently available at svn.irssi.org will, over a period of the next month, be migrated to our newly created Github organization. This means that no new commits will be made to our Subversion repositories and the Git repositories available on Github are from today the official way of getting the source code of Irssi. The primary Irssi client repository has already been migrated to Github and is available at github.com/irssi/irssi.

We will, starting today, expect contributors to fork the official Irssi repositories on Github, do their changes on a feature branch, and submit Github pull requests to us. The team will then review your changes and hopefully, together, we will be able to get your code into the official Irssi repository. This will make getting your contributions reviewed and merged smoother and it has the added benefit that your patches appears to be coming from you which in turn is helping to make the gap between being a core developer and a contributor close to non-existing.

Issue Tracking

This is one of the more controversial changes. Over time, you guys have submitted tons of bugs to our bug tracker at bugs.irssi.org only to see them rot.

We will, starting today, stop using bugs.irssi.org and use Github’s issue tracker instead.

We have decided not to do any automated migration of the bugs.irssi.org database. We realize that if we migrate everything over to Github, 1:1, it will only end up rotting in two bug trackers rather than in just one.

We hope to see interested contributors help us checking which bugs that are still affecting Irssi and resubmit them to our Github issue tracker.

We will manually go over opened bugs that contains patches to ensure that no code is left behind in the old tracker.

The bug tracker will remain online as a reference, but we will redirect to Github for people interested in reporting bugs.

Scripts

Submitting scripts is historically something you guys have been good at.

The way submitting scripts is currently done is that you write an email to scripts@irssi.org and someone from our team will manually add the script to the website. We’re well aware that we’ve lagged behind requests to add new scripts and update existing ones so we’re hoping to improve that too.

From now on, new scripts must be submitted, in a pull request, to the irssi/scripts repository. The repository contains a description on how to contribute.

This will make it much easier for our contributors to both add and maintain their scripts in the repository. It will also make it a lot easier for us to review and get code into the repository.

Scriptassist Users

For users using scriptassist.pl, you can start using the new repository right away using:

Otherwise, you can wait a month and the website will be migrated and everything should be working as usual, without you having to touch anything.

Official IRC Channels

We are moving the official development and user support channel to #irssi on freenode. Historically, we have had our official development channel on IRCnet, a social channel on EFnet and a user support channel on freenode, but we realize it makes more sense to keep everything together at freenode.

Closing Words

The changes to our contribution model will also affect people who are pulling from Subversion or scripts.irssi.org automatically.

Access to our Subversion repositories will be revoked and the move of scripts.irssi.org to the new Github site will happen on July 31st, 2014. Until then, neither of the two systems will be maintained and no new content will be published there.

Until the migration to Github is completed, you can find our official script repository at ghscripts.irssi.org. tomaw will continue being in charge of scripts and will happily review your pull requests on Github.

Feel free to reach out to anyone within the development team for questions, comments or ideas. We are hanging out in the #irssi channel on freenode, EFnet and IRCnet. You can contact us using email at staff@irssi.org. You are also welcome to PM me directly for questions; I am ahf on most of the larger IRC networks.

Irssi 0.8.15 on Windows: Testing Help Needed!

The Irssi for Windows installer and portable packages are finally in the process of being updated for Irssi 0.8.15.

Before the new Windows binaries are released, we'd like some Windows users to test the 0.8.15 installer in order to
prepare it for prime time. If you would like to help with the test effort, please read the testing notes
that outline the testing details, then download the test installer.

The Irssi Team would also like to wish you a happy holidays and all the best for the New Year.

Introducing Stalker: Nickname History For Irssi

Stalker is an Irssi plugin to correlate information on an IRC network and discover users' previously used
nicknames. The concept is fairly straightforward: given a nickname identify previously used hostnames.

From those hostnames, extract all nicknames they have used. Repeat until you have identified all nicknames a user might have used.

The advantage of this method over the more traditional "given a hostname identify all nicknames it has used" is that you can identify nicknames across hostmask addresses.

This release was brought to you by the Irssi Core Development teams tears, sweat and hard work and with invaluable contributions from our fabulous users. We'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome two new developers to the team; Alexander Færøy (ahf) and Tom Wesley (tomaw)

Alexander has been involved with Irssi for a while and joined the development team back in October 2008. He's also involved with the Exherbo project and he will be implementing some nifty new features for the next release! So keep your eyes peeled on the changelog and look out for his contributions!

Tom has also been around for some time, a long time Irssi user who over the years has dedicated much of his time to helping other users and easing the load on developers in the various #irssi support channels. He's recently agreed to take over the responsibility of maintaining the Scripts & Themes archives, so if you have updates, new scripts or themes and you would like them added to the site he's the person to talk to!

So, here's to Alex and Tom, two valuable contributors -- Welcome to the team!

If you want to get involved with Irssi, please get in touch with us! You can do so by having a chat with us in #irssi@IRCnet or by starting work on some of the outstanding issues in the Irssi Bug list! We don't bite, much! ;)

Windows installer

Joshua Dick and Sebastian Pipping have been putting our work into improving the Irssi experience for Windows users. We made an installer built on NSIS and an USB archive made to be put on an USB stick and allow carrying your personal Irssi instance with you.

Both packages offer running Irssi in two modes: either through cmd (the default Windows command line) or puttycyg (a Putty-based command line) which mainly looks better than cmd.